[Kprojekt]

So when live was released I decided to drop the Xbox and move onto a custom PC.
Here are my specs
BOX - Shuttle XPC K45
CHIPSET - Intel 945GC + ICH7
CPU - Intel Core 2 Duo E4500 Conroe 2.2HHZ
RAM - 1GB PC2-5400
HDD - 750GB Seagate SATA 7200RPM
REMOTE - Microsoft Remote Control w/Receiver for WinXP MCE
USB - Kingston Travel 4GB

Set up boot priority to USB in bios. Setup Autoboot in .cfg file. In XBMC I mounted my local drive, setup SFTP to load in new content. And am using a Samsung 32" LCDTV with PC(VGA) Input.

My experience has been quite great. The box is silent, movies play at 1080i without dropped frames. I've encountered only one issue with XBMC and that is the amount of RAM it eats up. After doing a library update for 300 items - the Free memory dropped to 23MB and stayed there. Everything else is absolutely perfect.

Other issue I have with hardware is my Audio output. The TV only allows Optical input to complement the VGA port. Is there any way to have a PC/Headphone Output to Optical?

Also my other question is DVD support. I've read a while ago that DVD was a bit of a flake on Linux. Does the Live support DVD drives? My initial tests where on a Sony Vaio Laptop with no success. Before I buy an external DVD is there any brands I should look into?

[althekiller]

I'm assuming you mean the free memory as reported by XBMC? It isn't XBMC but the OS that is retaining that memory. Linux uses your extra RAM for disk buffering and only gives it back if an application needs it. So when XBMC went out and hit the HDD and network for all those movies it used up a lot of buffer space. Now that it's done the buffers are still there because nothing has requested enough RAM to cause them to be freed. Some linux applications that display system stats will subtract this buffer space from the used memory when calculating free space, however when developing, the actual memory usage is more useful.